Sir John Tomes FRS, Fellows of the Royal Society, and dental reform in the nineteenth century.

In this paper Sir John Tomes HonFRCS LDS FRS (1815-95), surgeon-dentist, is presented as the agent through whose membership of the Royal Society the previously disorganized profession of dentistry shared in the process of reform and scientific progress that engaged the medical profession in the second half of the nineteenth century. The study identifies 70 of the Fellows of the Royal Society who were involved in medical and dental research and/or who gave structure and effect to the governance of the medical and dental professions. In recording the education of Tomes as a scientist, his election to the Society and his place in the process of reform, the paper identifies the Royal Society as a superculture, enabling him to act at a functional remove from the cultures of the surgeons and the dentists of the day.